Looking at the world’s first data protection law, the Swedish ”Datalagen” of 1973 and comparing the issues raised at the time with those concerning last year’s EU law ”The Right to be Forgotten”. This paper aims to highlight some of the similarities of and differences between the technical as well as social contexts of these two historical settings (1974 and 2014) with regard to the views of computerized public records. Information erasure as an economic, political or editorial practice but also the case of erasure as a dynamic and inherent other at the opposite end of technologies of memory and storage; as a point of departure to understand the archive, the word processor or the pencil, starting from techniques of deletion rather than inscription. Being secretly obsessed with the thought of erasure, archival theory has much to offer media studies in terms of information overflow strategies and issues of preservation. In addition, the appraisal and deaccessioning practices puts the archive in a position of one of unsurpassed experience of information waste management; the site of remembrance is also, and necessarily, the destroyer of documents.